Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “Scams just keep popping up when you Google. On Monday, I found what appeared to be impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency company, in the “People also ask” section high up in Google. A group of people experienced in Google’s intricacies also said this week that it took… Continue Reading
Annie Burns-Pieper] via Data is Plural: “The Multinational Enterprise Information Platform, a collaboration between the OECD and the UN Statistics Division, provides publicly sourced data on the 500 multinational corporations with the largest market capitalization. Its “Global Register” dataset examines the companies’ structure, listing each subsidiary’s name, parent company, address, alternative names, and various unique… Continue Reading
PC Mag: “Two cybersecurity firms launch separate websites that can tell you if your personal information, including Social Security number, was exposed in the National Public Data breach. A massive data breach has Americans worried about their private info getting into the wrong hands, but a pair of newly released websites could make it easier… Continue Reading
VentureBeat: “A new report from Deloitte sheds light on the complex landscape of generative AI adoption in the enterprise, revealing both significant progress and persistent challenges. The survey, titled “The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise: Now decides next,” gathered insights from 2,770 business and technology leaders across 14 countries and six industries. The… Continue Reading
Even laypeople use legalese Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson – MIT. Published August 19, 2024. PNAS 121 (35). “Why are laws so complicated? Across two preregistered experiments, we found that people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual… Continue Reading
“Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored,” Katy Y. Y. Tam, PhD, and Michael Inzlicht, PhD, University of Toronto, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, published online Aug. 19, 2024. “Boredom is unpleasant, with people going to great lengths to avoid it. One way to escape boredom and increase stimulation is to consume digital… Continue Reading
Via LLRX – Rejecting Dogmas Around AI, User Privacy, and Tech Policy – The Markup’s Ross Teixeira had a virtual discussion with Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at DataBricks, about the the ethics of companies using customer data to train models, the growing trend of integrating AI models into our personal devices and lives, and how people can… Continue Reading
Via LLRX – Power-hungry AI is driving a surge in tech giant carbon emissions. Nobody knows what to do about it – Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the world has seen an incredible surge in investment, development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. According to one estimate, the amount of computational power… Continue Reading
Axios: “The Washington Post on Sunday published its first-ever story built on the work of a new AI tool called Haystacker that allows journalists to sift through large data sets — video, photo or text — to find newsworthy trends or patterns. Why it matters: In an interview, the Post’s chief technology officer, Vineet Khosla,… Continue Reading
Ars Technica – TV software is getting loaded with ads, changing what it means to own a TV set: “The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset. Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV… Continue Reading
Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5. Full text available free. “Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are… Continue Reading
Krebs on Security: “New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords… Continue Reading